I wasn’t planning to this weekend - I was planning to buy one, but not just this weekend - but my Dell continued to consume vast amounts of cursing time last week, and I managed to buy the wrong kind of HD disk to replace the one I think is dying.

Anyhow, I couldn’t survive another week with a spluttering Dell, so I scraped together the funds remaining in the bottom of my bank accounts and got Sam to drive me to Southampton to the Apple Store there.

I bought the cheapest MacBook, with a view to upgrading it to 4Gb of RAM pretty soon. In the final analysis, the others didn’t seem to warrant the extra wonga. The extra few processor cycles didn’t sway, I haven’t burned a DVD for 18 months and somehow a black MacBook didn’t look enough like a Mac for this Apple virgin.

So far, installing software has been a breeze - if more than a little foreign to a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user like me. I’ve been using MS software since way back in the DOS days. Even VMware Fusion wasn’t a challenge - I’m going to be using my Windows version of MS Office to ensure I have 100% compatibility with my clients’ documents.

However, as soon as I step outside the apps - Firefox is more-or-less the same no matter which platform you care to run it on, for example - I’m completely disorientated, like I’ve just found myself in Tokyo rather than London. It’s still an OS, but the rules are different and the ways of getting around are still confusing me.

I’m sure everything will become natural to me, but I’m not sure how quickly.